To name something is to begin to understand it.

My five-year-old son, like many children, enjoys looking at clouds. A few weeks ago, he clued into the fact that different kinds of clouds had different names. And so, being of good geek stock, he proceeded to memorize them—cirrus, cumulus, stratus, cirrostratus, cumulonimbus, altostratus, lenticular; all of the ones I knew, and then some.

I’d certainly never heard of “cumulus congestus” before.

Now, when he looks at the sky, he can tell me which clouds are which. More than that, he notices more than he did before, and with greater nuance. He has learned to visually discriminate among cloud types based on texture, color, height, movement, and who knows what else. (They’re not always easy to tell apart, of course, but that doesn’t bother him.) He can predict, with some accuracy, which ones might drop rain on us and which won’t.

And in his limited preschooler’s fashion, he uses his cloud knowledge to analyze the big picture. “Cirrostratus clouds might mean a warm front,” he points out. Or, “Cumulus congestus might turn into cumulonimbus! Then we could get a storm.”

Above all, he enjoys knowing these names. Little kids seem to get a kick out of naming the things they love, whether they’re clouds, dinosaurs, bugs, cars, dolls, or movie characters. Certainly their imaginations aren’t limited by that left-brain knowledge, despite our grownup romantic biases—my son still sees palaces and ducks and cauliflowers in the clouds, even as he names them “cumulus.”

So it is with us grownups. That brings us to the topic at hand: by recognizing and naming patterns in interfaces, we “see” those interfaces better. We notice more details, because our brains are more attuned to what we should look for. We can start to predict the workings of the software we use, because we know how certain interface patterns should behave. Then we can tell other people what we see via an expressive new vocabulary.

And how do we learn these patterns?